Month: October 2016

Liverpudlian teens The Night Café returned a few weeks ago with a brand new single, the jaunty, pop-tinged ‘Mixed Signals.’ Following on from ‘Time’ earlier in the year, the song focused on the journey through heartbreak in the aftermath of a broken relationship, mixing together sweetly jangly guitars and shimmering vocal melodies.

The band have now revealed a new video for the single, which is a thoroughly DIY affair. It follows the group on tour as they document some of their gigs, a bit of the mundanity of life on the road, and do a little skateboarding. The whole clip looks like it was shot on VHS, giving it a vintage charm. Watch below.

This December the group are also heading off on a headline tour of the UK. Details below.

3rd December – Arts Club, Liverpool
5th December – The Bullingdon, Oxford
6th December – Louisiana, Bristol
7th December – The Old Blue Last London
8th December – Bodega, Nottingham
9th December – The Cookie, Leicester
10th December – Sunflower Lounge, Birmingham

Polaris Prize winner and Inuit punk vocalist Tanya Tagaq is set to release her new album Retribution on 18th November. The follow up to 2014’s Animism is set to be more musically aggressive, and also more political, capturing the essence of a violent world on the verge of destruction. It also promises to link the lack of respect for women’s rights with a lack of respect for the planet and Indigenous rights.

After sharing the single ‘Centre,’ featuring the rapper Shad, she’s now unveiled the title track of the album. Piercing violins accompany Tagaq on the track as she moves between yelping and grunting lyrics that deftly sum up the themes of the album as a whole. It’s a call to arms against the world’s ills. Listen below.

Tagaq will also be playing a few shows in the UK in January as part of a wider European tour. Details below.

‘Trashorama’ is the new single by anti-pop/industrial electro-punk band St Lucifer. The Mancunian four-piece have been infecting crowds around the North with their unique brand of ‘gaymetaldisco’ and thought-provoking lyrics. ‘Trashorama’ is perhaps their grandest release yet. The video for the single, directed by Morganna Bramah, involves the band up to their usual antics, playing to a room full of misfits in the midst of total anarchy. Despite being around for only a year, their debut album is expected to be released later this year through the recently-revived Valentine Records.

London’s historic Regent Street Cinema will be hosting the launch of Brainfeeder Films, masterminded by hip hop and jazz fusion producer Steven Ellison, better known as Flying Lotus. Taking place on Wednesday 16th November, the evening will feature a screening of Ellison’s directorial debut ROYAL (which is being extended into a new feature film, Kuso). The night will also feature the world premiere of two films by David Firth, perhaps best known for his animated webseries Salad Fingers as well as working on the video for Flying Lotus’ ‘Ready Err Not’ in 2014.

Firth’s short film CREAM tells the story of a scientific genius, Dr. Bellifer, who unveils a revolutionary new cream that has the power to solve all of the world’s problems. Meanwhile, the feature-length Umbilical World sees broken pieces of a nightmare coming together to form an animated toybox of delights.

Flying Lotus commented: “CREAM represents David’s incredible talent and his ability to continue to amaze audiences with his edgy and envelope-pushing animation. I am looking forward to breaking boundaries with him as we continue to develop and produce animated and live-action content at Brainfeeder Films.”

The inspiration for Flit – a highly inventive, inspired animation and music live show – came from when Martin Green was recording his 88-year old grandmother reminiscing about her life. Picking up on her stories about fleeing Austria in the 1930s – his family were Jewish refugees in that country – Green, accordionist, electronic experimentalist and one third of the folk trio Lau and a man who is no stranger to the word innovation, began to develop his concept of migration.

As the tales of the displacement of various people from all around the world began to emerge – from the Shetland Islands to southwest Asia – so too did Green’s vision develop. He harnessed the many and varied musical talents of several individuals, including the songwriters Anaïs Mitchell, Karine Polwart, Aidan Moffat of the highly influential Scots indie rock band Arab Strap and Sandy Wright who translated these very human stories into song lyrics.

Martin Green also recruited fellow musicians Becky Unthank (from the celebrated Northumbrian folk band The Unthanks) and the young singer-songwriter and rising Portobello star Adam Holmes on vocals, plus Mogwai’s Dominic Aitchison on bass guitar and the Portishead guitarist Adrian Utley – with whom he collaborated on the album Flit and which was released earlier this month – and who all appear with Green on the Howard Assembly Room stage tonight.

Yet this musical aspect only tells part of the Flit story. With a view to recreating these recordings in a live performance environment, and having been attracted to them by what he describes as their “humanity and DIY gorgeousness”, Martin Green approached the Bafta-winning animators Whiterobot. This creative partnership of Will Anderson and Ainslie Henderson then devised what is a quite staggering set design out of brown packaging paper. Their source material – presented in a huge backdrop that resembles a mountain range, against which a series of animated birds and creatures (often transmuting into one another) are projected – symbolises transience and an all-enveloping sense of movement.

Adam Holmes and Becky Unthank

The end result – an immeasurably fluid feast for the eyes and ears – is astonishing. For over an hour the audience are immersed in a figurative sea of human expression. As the stories of identity, belonging, genetic connections and enforced evacuations unravel before us, we are transported into some faraway mythical lands. Yet for all of their visual obscurity, the places to where we travel all become uncomfortably familiar. The plight of all those vulnerable young refugees in Calais fleeing their own personal horrors, in but one modern example, must surely be in many people’s minds tonight.

These disturbing images are lent an even greater weight by the immense sound that accompanies them. Green’s score is a great amalgam of folk and electronic music over which Unthank and Holmes’ contrasting voices beautifully dovetail. Much of Flit’s nascent sound had been developed in Adrian Utley’s studio in Bristol and the influence of the Portishead guitarist can be heard in some of the darker, more dense fabric of some of these songs. There are also numerous touches of Green’s imaginative, experimental virtuosity as he alternates between his accordion, expressive narrative links and a musical contraption that resembles a harp, as well as the sight of Adam Holmes playing what appears to be a bookshelf with lots of saws on it.

Yet for all of these many moments of individual brilliance, Flit’s undeniable success lies in its firm collaborative grasp. It is a most thoughtful, compassionate and poignant work of collective art that is built upon the firm principle of partnership and a shared belief in the strength of the human spirit to survive against all odds.

People in high places have been shocked by the ignorance of the leading Brexiters, who are embarked on a course which threatens, unless they are thwarted by our sovereign parliament, to bring this country to a sorry state.

Apple has published its latest quarterly figures and the doomsayers are again questioning its future. They should look at the facts

It’s that time of year again. Apple has released its results for the fiscal quarter ended 24 September 2016 and we are immediately plunged into “Has Apple peaked?” speculation. How come? Well, the company posted quarterly revenue of $46.9bn and net income of $9bn. Not bad, eh? Ah, yes, but not if you’re a Wall Street analyst, because these numbers compare to revenue of $51.5bn and net income of $11.1bn in the same quarter the year before. And – shock, horror! – the company’s gross margin was only 38% compared to 39.9% a year ago. The numbers are down, in other words.

Cue fevered speculation about the fate of the company. The numbers, burbled one analyst, show “the danger of being a one-trick pony when everyone already owns a pony. The company’s reliance on the smartphone, which is now a mature and saturated market in the developed world, is starting to create a growth problem for Apple. Breaking through will be a challenge, reminding investors Apple’s fundamentals and stock price have peaked.”

Historian Jerry White has produced a penetrating micro-history of a time when ordinary Londoners’ lives were ruled by debt and fear of imprisonment

In 18th century London and the first half of the 19th, debt and its effects ate at the soul of society, as they do now. The difference was that in those days, debt was always personal. Those who owed did not fear credit card demands or banks, but people, streets and areas they knew. “It impacted on personal space,” explains distinguished London historian Jerry White. “People were moving around London all the time to avoid their creditors – moving rooms, avoiding certain streets or areas.” And failure to avoid could be disastrous: for want of as little as a few shillings, you could be thrown into a death pit of a jail.

The subject of White’s new book is that London’s most notorious debtors’ prison, the Marshalsea in Southwark. Mansions of Misery, his biography of the institution, which stood on two different sites on what is now Borough High Street, begins by describing London’s vast landscape of debt and its ubiquity in everyday life. Fearful debtors were everywhere. So were places for locking them up – London had more jails than any other city in Europe. Those dodging incarceration up could take refuge in The Mint, an area near the Marshalsea, which enjoyed an anomalous legal status protecting them from arrest.